Question

Is there any way to get a page source along with IE comments via WatiN? WatiN exposes DocumentElement.outerHTML but it contains a document without the comments.

EDIT When we have a look at IE comments via View Source in IE, we see something like:

<!--[if IE]>
<p>Welcome to Internet Explorer.</p>
<![endif]-->

But when we have a look at the actually rendered HTML via the document object, we see only:

<p>Welcome to Internet Explorer.</p>

I.e. the IE comments are not included into the rendered document, but the usual HTML comments are.

Answer 1

Add this to top of your code:

using SHDocVw;

and use this to get the actual HTML content

InternetExplorer internetExplorer = (InternetExplorer)browser.InternetExplorer;
string htmlContent = internetExplorer.Document.documentElement.OuterHTML;

Good luck.

Edit:
It seems I misunderstood what you want. After you edit your post, I tried something. Opened a website in Opera and Chrome which include <!--[if IE]-->, then ran this command in the console: document.head.innerHTML. Both browsers gave output with the [if IE], however when trying it in IE it seems after the page is rendered IE removes all of these.

There must be some way to achieve this but I couldn’t find a solution without downloading the whole page with System.Net or something else then reading its content.

Edit 2:
I found another way, but not sure if you like the solution. Look at this code: http://pastebin.com/4EvLSuEL

It makes an ajax call to load the page content, then pastes the result into a hidden textarea. After that, by using WatiN’s ElementWithTag we get that textarea value into our string myContent.

Hope it helps you, this is what I can do best.